A War That Can't Be Won

Sunday I passed a TV someone had left on and Christiane Amanpour was talking with some expert about the Afghan opium trade and how it's worth $65 billion a year. That's a lot of money and a lot of sharp operators would like to control that very special non-taxed resource. Let's see... the Taliban, the CIA, the Russian Mafia, Karzai, the Pakistanis... Yesterday's NY Times had this whole story about how the guy who runs the opium trade for President Hamid Karzai, his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a CIA asset. Gee, I hope all those American kids aren't over there dying because the CIA-- who, believe it or not, lies to Congress when it's convenient for them-- wants an independent source of income they can use without having to account to anyone.

Call me crazy, but instead of building in an opt out for red states that don't want their poor citizens to have health care, Congress should be opting out of Afghanistan... now. I'm not even the only one who thinks that. I mean aside from the 32 courageous Democrats who stood against the Obama supplemental war budget last June, there's the story of Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq who was working in the State Department's development efforts in Zabul province between Kandahar and Kabul. Last month Hoh resigned-- "the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency." Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and then Richard Holbrooke appealed to him to stay-- but to no avail.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

...[M]any Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there-- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because "I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.'"

The U.S. has no role in Afghanistan. It is an occupation that will only end in tragedy for everyone concerned and probably doom America to another Republican-run government here in the U.S. if Obama doesn't find the depth of character to stand up to the Pentagon and just say no.




UPDATE: Feingold Talking Inconvenient Truth On The Senate Floor Again

This afternoon it wasn't the wrong-headed George Bush war policies Russ Feingold was deconstructing; it was the wrong-headed Barack Obama war policies. As a member of the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, he addressed four common myths in the debate regarding Afghanistan.

·         Myth 1 – Preventing a potential al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan is more important than addressing existing safe havens elsewhere.
·         Myth 2 – We’ve already tried counterterrorism and it didn’t work.
·         Myth 3 – Additional troops will regain the initiative in Afghanistan.
·         Myth 4 – We can pursue a heavy handed strategy in Afghanistan without further destabilizing Pakistan.